Fifty theatre makers from the UK joined nine visitors from India to learn about contemporary theatre in both countries – and explore ideas for collaborative working in the future. The Indian visitors then stayed in Edinburgh for a week, seeing vast quantities of theatre and making connections.

Click here for the programme for the event

Click here for a full transcript of the discussions (coming soon)

Click here for the contemporaneous notes from some of the Open Space discussions in the afternoon (coming soon)

It started with an innovative one-day theatre symposium in Edinburgh, at the Scottish Book Trust on Saturday, 22 August 2009 from 9.30 a.m. The symposium combined three seminars – giving a general introduction to Indian theatre, exploring what collaboration means in an Indian context, and throwing light on the exciting new generation of theatre makers that are emerging in India – with an in-depth Open Space session, a uniquely democratic approach to conferencing run by theatre company Improbable.

Besides several British speakers, nine Indian theatre practitioners participated in the seminar. They were

			Sanjoy Ganguly (Jana Sanskriti)
			Quasar Thakore Padamsee (Q Productions)
			Rabijita Gogoi (Jirsong Theatre)
			Devissaro (Asima)
			Amitesh Grover
			Jyotish MG (Abhinaya Theatre)
			G Channakeshava
			Divya Kumar Bhatia
			Sunil Vishnu (Evam)

The British Council’s core arts objective in India is to enable creative collaboration, and eventually long-term partnership, between artists, producers and arts organisations in the UK and their counterparts in India, across a full range of art forms. In order to do that, we have embarked on a programme of “creative networking”, starting here with theatre: bringing the innovators and the creative minds together to learn from one another, start conversations, allow them to gestate and see what emerges.